Chapter 435: The Indestructible Necklace
After the incident with the assassin, Charles quietly shifted Leo’s training into a secured, restricted zone deep within the military base, in an area where only a handful of trusted personnel were allowed to access.
But it wasn’t just for Leo’s safety.
Charles used the move as bait, deliberately drawing out any other lingering assassins into a controlled perimeter he monitored round the clock. And over the next two days, his plan worked, as he eliminated four more agents from the righteous faction who had somehow slipped through the Cult’s internal checks.
"This is absolutely outrageous. Our internal security is garbage if the righteous faction can infiltrate Cult territory this easily," Charles muttered, growing increasingly frustrated by the holes in their vetting system.
From the very next morning, he launched a reform.
A specialized unit within the army was ordered to carry out thorough background checks, surprise screenings, and intense cross-verification procedures on every soldier in the base, no matter their rank.
As the increased pressure and constant scrutiny made it nearly impossible for Black Serpent agents to remain hidden.
After the new system was put in place, the army caught and eliminated seven more assassins, as word quickly spread among the remaining soldiers that outsiders had infiltrated the base with the intent to assassinate their beloved Dragon Candidate, causing paranoia to take hold almost immediately.
Everyone began watching everyone.
Even the slightest hint of strange behavior was immediately reported to superiors, and within five days, the last of the infiltrated agents were flushed out and executed.
The message spread quickly amongst the Serpent ranks that infiltrating the Cult meant a certain death sentence, as not only did Leo have a whole army protecting him, he also had a Monarch Tier commander protecting him round the clock.
—-------------
Over the past seven days, Leo concentrated his efforts on breaching the next threshold of aura mastery by stepping into the realm of intent, while also dedicating time to mastering the strange yet powerful treasure he had recently taken from the Black Serpents Vault.
Yet, despite Charles’s best efforts to simplify the concept of intent and ground it in practice, Leo made almost no headway in that direction, as his understanding of that elusive realm continued to evade him, floating just out of reach no matter how hard he chased it.
But while his progress in the realm of intent remained stagnant, a different kind of breakthrough emerged in his training with the necklace, as the rusted chain he had once considered a mundane relic began to reveal secrets that surpassed anything he had hoped for.
What he originally assumed to be a basic defensive artifact, something that offered passive protection for the neck and upper chest, turned out to possess a far more advanced function.... As hidden beneath its lifeless surface, was a form of mobile armor projection system that could be consciously directed to manifest on any specific region of his body at will.
When he willed it to move from his neck to his left arm, the armor’s surface flowed with a controlled liquidity, rippling downward across the shoulder joint and slithering along the length of his bicep and forearm like living metal, before finally wrapping around his palm and fingers, hardening into the form of a gauntlet as if it had always belonged there.
The entire transition, from the base of his neck to the tips of his fingers, completed in approximately 0.11 seconds, a timeframe so fast it would be imperceptible to most, yet not fast enough to be considered truly instantaneous, and certainly not fast enough to save him if his timing slipped.
He could feel it moving across his skin as it traveled, a cold ripple that registered as a faint pressure more than a temperature shift, and this movement applied to all regions of the body, with the travel time dictated by distance.
So while covering his arm or upper torso happened in fractions of a second, shifting the armor down to his feet, his furthest body part, took around 0.22 seconds to complete, which in isolation sounded negligible, but in the midst of battle, where a tenth of a second could decide whether one lived or died, it was a delay that demanded constant awareness.
Still, minor lag aside, the armor’s primary strength was unquestionable.
Once it manifested, it could not be pierced.
No weapon, no matter how sharp, fast, or reinforced, could punch through it once it was in place.
Even Charles, using a high-grade sword during sparring, failed to leave so much as a scratch, despite striking with focused intent and full force.
"Goddamn it, son. This armor really is impenetrable if even I can’t scratch it with proper steel in hand," Charles muttered, clearly both amused and mildly irritated at the discovery.
But even invincibility had its limits.
Though it blocked all forms of penetration damage, the armor offered no mitigation against blunt force trauma.
The kinetic energy of a strike still passed through the plating and into the flesh beneath, which meant that while Leo could survive a spear to the chest without a puncture.... if the impact was strong enough, his ribs could still collapse under the pressure.
’I can’t rely on it to block everything, what needs to be dodged still needs to be dodged,’ Leo realized after a test run with Charles, as during their testing of the armors strength, a full powered blow from Charles managed to shatter the bones in his fingers clean through, even though the surface of the armor itself remained untouched.
As it was then that Leo realized that for all its power, this armor wasn’t an all-shielding gift.
It couldn’t make him a wall. It couldn’t make him a tank. It couldn’t stop him from being knocked out cold if the force behind the strike was overwhelming enough.
But what it could do was save him from death.
From assassination attempts, from well-placed kill shots, from arrows and blades and poisoned daggers meant to end him in a heartbeat.
So long as he trained himself to time it right, to place the armor exactly where it needed to be in the exact moment it was needed, this artifact could give him something no amount of physical strength ever could.
And so, every single day without fail, Leo trained.
He trained to move the armor in motion, during a dodge, while spinning mid-air, even as he rolled across the floor.
He practiced shifting it across difficult angles, sending it from his shoulder to his lower back, from his hip to his thigh, from his kneecap to his jawline, until the transitions burned into his muscle memory like second nature.
He trained to reduce hesitation, to eliminate wasted thought, to cut down the time it took to trigger a shift from conscious effort to subconscious reflex.
He would sprint toward a swinging weapon and wait until the very last instant before triggering the armor, forcing himself to trust the timing, forcing himself not to flinch, forcing himself to believe that 0.2 seconds was enough to save him.
He let Charles strike him repeatedly with dulled weapons just to learn how much of the impact he could survive and how much pain he could afford to absorb if the alternative was death.
And through all of it, Leo came to a quiet conclusion.
The armor was not perfect.
It did not make him immortal.
But it gave him a layer of defense that no one else had, a sliver of insurance when he danced too close to death.
And for someone like him, someone who would always be hunted, always be targeted, always be outnumbered and underestimated, that was more valuable than any sword, spear, or conventional shield he could find otherwise in the universe.